Vacation Insomnia and the Hotel Business Office

Dec 17, 2016

As a remote worker I’ve found that you tend to work more, there are fewer distractions, there are no co-workers to go out with, etc, so you just work more. And when you always have a laptop with you then even vacation tends to flow into work. One of the oddest things about being a remote worker is that you end up with recollections of work that are entirely cognitively dissonant with work itself.

Here are a few examples:

When I first wrote the iOS version of AppData after fighting an internal battle hard that iOS mattered (this was back in 2010 or 2011) I remember staying at a cheap Dallas hotel with bad wifi on vacation with my family when I first wrote that crawler

I can’t tell even begin you how much code I wrote from Great Wolf Lodge on different family trips. I suspect I’ve not only written code there but entire products there.

The last time I was in Disney world I wrote an anti-spam algorithm to evaluate your Twitter followers for their spamminess related to your content. I guess that wasn’t for work tho – more for late night boredom.

So I’m once again on a short vacation and I find myself in the hotel business office working in wonderful, blessed quiet and darkness. This time I’m in the hotel’s business office and it is absolutely lovely. After a night’s drive on the way to our destination and a late checkin I found myself up at the crack of 1 am. And with three other people in the hotel room, what do you do? Well, if you’re me, you shower, shave, grab your gear and find a place with wifi.

And this time around I’m rewriting the core crawl / recursive_crawl routines for our main HTML crawler. This is a core loop which is the innermost guts of our crawler and it is ugly beyond belief. I can say that because I’m one of its two core authors. This is a routine which takes like 8 parameters and returns 7 (or the other way around; even I can’t tell). So I’m in the middle of a massive refactor where it takes in one struct and returns another. And I know it will be better but right now I suspect it resembles a butcher shop when a flood of carcasses has just arrived – there’s blood everywhere and bits of bone and gristle from the big band saws that a real butcher shop would actually use. Even if you’re a self confessed carnivore like myself, you likely wouldn’t want to see it and that’s how I feel right now. I want this refactor done desperately but, man, even I don’t want to do this work.

which means that I’ve made a crawler which, now, does not crawl. Groan. I wish I’d stayed in bed. Happily that likely means that I’ve missed something basic like a conditional since at least my basic return structure is better. And, while writing this, I just found it – I had omitted a conditional.

Now I suspect that a number of my readers are saying something along the lines of “Dude – it is vacation; STOP CODING!” and I will. And you are right but there are some mitigating factors

this is time sensitive work that needs to get done before year end

I suffer from an over developed sense of personal responsibility on all fronts

everyone else is sleeping which means no reading, no media to consume

workaholic

The strongest mitigating factor here tho is that I’ve found that when I’m forced to leave my home office it often spurs creativity fairly dramatically. Just as an example we normally compare crawl results to past crawls only on 2 dimensions, pages and links because the attributes for those versus past crawls are easily accessible. What I just realized tho is that I can implement a simple JSON api and compare my new crawl against any of the dimensions by which we crawl - forms, iframes, etc. And, in the process of writing this post, I actually implemented that JSON api.